Owner of apartment burned in NYC crash was also victim of bizarre accident

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NEW YORK — A woman whose apartment was burned in the high-rise crash of New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle’s plane was the victim of another frightening, bizarre and high-profile Manhattan accident years earlier, when a lamppost knocked over by a parade float seriously injured her.

Kathleen Caronna and her family were unhurt in Wednesday’s crash, which killed Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger. But the engine of the Cirrus SR20 landed in her bedroom, which went up in flames minutes before she would arrived home, her relatives told the Daily News in Friday’s editions.

“How do you go through two major things like this?” Caronna’s sister-in-law, Lisa Brown, told the paper. “It’s spooky. It’s very spooky.”

Caronna was critically injured during the 1997 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when the mammoth Cat in the Hat balloon went out of control and knocked part of a lamppost onto her head. The then-33-year-old investment analyst lay in a coma for nearly a month.

Caronna had been watching the parade with her husband and infant son at 72nd Street and Central Park West. The plane crash occurred at 72nd and York Avenue, several blocks east.

The phone rang busy Friday at the apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that she shares with her husband, Ignazio Massimo, and their son, now 9.